BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups has long been recognized as a St. Louis cultural landmark where music, nightlife, and urban history intersect in an architectural artifact from the mid-1800s. Built in what was then known as Frenchtown, what began as a private residence was rapidly expanded to meet the needs of a growing St. Louis as a boarding house for travelers brought to town on the river that helped build the city. It later became a reception hall, a general mercantile and a millinery in a time when hats were the rule. It was known as Phil’s boarding house as late as 1969. The building that long served as a gathering spot took on new cultural significance in 1976, when Mark O’Shaughnessy founded BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups inside the historic space. Instead of modernizing the rustic interior, O’Shaughnessy embraced the building’s worn textures and intimate layout, creating a live music venue that felt both authentic and timeless. Its narrow stature, wooden floors, and balcony levels offered an atmosphere ideally suited to the raw immediacy of blues and jazz. Over subsequent years, BB’s developed into a cornerstone of St. Louis music life. Forming a point on the South Broadway “Blues Triangle,” it prioritized regional talent and the traditional American music forms of blues, jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues. What began as a 19th-century hub of lodging and social life evolved into a 20th-century cultural institution, still dedicated to gathering people together – only now through the shared experience of live music. Henry Townsend, a true St Louis legend, was the first performance on the BB’s stage. Other artists soon followed such as Roosevelt Sykes and Albert King, with a later slate of regulars including Oliver Sain, Johnnie Johnson, Tommy Bankhead, Big George Brock, Patti & The Hit Men, Kim Massie and Marquise Knox. In so doing, the walls slowly filled with photographs and memorabilia that effectively turned the interior into a living archive of local musical heritage. When the club closed in 2023, there was a hole left in the city’s cultural soul; the shuttered BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups endured as a physical reminder and symbol of the urban center’s downturn. But BB's breathes new life as it reopens on October 29th, 2026.